The people of the Philippines, their religious progress and preparation for spiritual leadership in the Far East,

INTRODUCTORY

since. In Manila they found five hundred Spanish friars who
had fled from the provinces for their lives. Hysterically
these representatives of the church told of their comrades
having been roasted alive, torn limb from limb, beheaded,
mutilated-extermination, they hissed, of the whole brown
race was the only measure to adopt; for the Filipinos had
sworn to exterminate every white man on the Islands! This
lurid Spanish, punctuated with frantic gestures (Spanish is
rich in vituperative expletives), when translated into English,
sounded worse than anything Americans had ever read of
Wild West Indians. Thus prejudiced, the soldiers saw something sinister in bare feet, bare heads, bare backs, bolos, nipa
roofs-anything out of the ordinary. The Filipinos fought
for home and country with desperate bravery; employing
guerilla warfare, since to have faced the vastly superior military equipment of the Americans in any other way would
have been sheer suicide-but to American soldiers, with their
ideas of civilized warfare, this was the final proof that the
Filipinos were bloodthirsty savages. The vast majority of
the seventy thousand American soldiers in the Philippines returned to their homeland without ever having known the
Filipinos save as enemies. From these soldiers, with their
meager information and their fertile imagination, came the
material for those distorted accounts which book-agents sold
throughout the United States as "The History of the Conquest of the Philippines." Who has not seen a volume like
this in many a library, the only "authority," perhaps, on the
Philippine Islands?
The truth is that the Filipinos hate war. They avoid trouble
and will submit to tyranny long after an American would
have rebelled. They are meek, quiet, gentle, kindly, hospitable,
very polite-these men whom Americans have supposed to
be merciless, warlike and savage! Indeed they excel the average American in every one of the above mentioned respectsthey are more meek, more gentle, more kindly, more polite,
more hospitable. As Leonard Wood says, "The Philippine
people possess many fine and attractive qualities-dignity and
self-respect, as shown by deportment.. personal neatness